


Stain

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [21]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Abduction, Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Kidnapping, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Power Swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:53:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23040511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: The Merchants don't take recruits, they take victims. Taylor couldn't be the former, was forced into the latter, and it's all she can do is keep going.
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 1
Kudos: 43





	Stain

**Author's Note:**

> cw for forced drug use and abduction
> 
> Taylor has Velvet's power, for those who aren't aware / haven't read Ward or the former PRT Quest, where she was introduced.

There was a genre of fiction that had been around since the advent of capes, and even a little while before that, though they were less common, more niche products before it became a fully realized reality. It was, in the loosest turn of phrase, books about characters who the reader could easily project themselves onto gaining powers and using them to be a hero of some kind. There were enough of them, and they’d been popular enough in her childhood, that the sheer amount of variety made up for the mostly rote storylines and powers you might not terribly enjoy reading about. Sure, the bulk majority had characters with Alexandria packages or some form of flying Blaster mix, but there were a few odds-and-ends that she’d read as a child, had been inspired by. Stories of people down on their luck, dealing with awful circumstances, rising above their station with powers and becoming heroes, becoming someone they could smile at when looking in the mirror.

Squealer jostled Taylor’s shoulder, a harsh yank that sent a spasm of pain down her arm. “Pay attention, we’re fuckin’ gettin near.” She hissed, voice low and harsh, forcing Taylor to shrink back in her seat, to try to get out of reach of her hands, not that it would help any. “Skids is already there and the heroes are fuckin’ thinkin’ about lockin’ him down. Mush’s there as well, but that filthy little shit couldn’t protect _my fuckin’ cars_ , so I won’t trust him with my goddamn motherfucking boyfriend.”

Squealer - Sherrel - was not an easy woman to be a subordinate for. Not that any of this had been altogether consensual, a Merchant had seen her with her powers and had beaten her unconscious before dragging her off to be ‘properly inducted’ into the Merchants, which had more or less amounted to a gruelling cycle of acting as Squealer’s patsy contrasted by needles being shoved into the crook of her arm whenever she had too much free time. She’d resisted at first, for sure, she’d earned a bloody nose and had given one back, but at this point, the needy itch the drugs left over when they were gone was already nearly consuming her focus, not to mention that being high generally took the edge off of her new reality, made it easier to just accept her lot in life, however fucked that lot was.

They’d broken her, in other words. They promised that if she ran her father would be dead and they’d find her and use her as a hole to fill, not to mention most of them were more or less positive that she was already hooked on the product, and they’d be right. She might be able to hold off the addiction if she stopped now, if she pulled and ran, got help, tried to get to her Dad before someone put a hail of bullets into him, but she really couldn’t see it, not anymore. Her fears about drugs, about addiction, being little more than an endless hole that took and took and took and never really gave anything back had been right, but it said something that, even with that knowledge and understanding, she couldn’t really bring herself to care anymore.

Squealer slammed her heel into the breaks, yanking the wheel to one side. The entire vehicle lurched unpleasantly as it screamed to a stop, the heavy sound of the car-mounted, automated turret swivelling towards the amassed group of PRT officers was even worse. Watching them run as the turret began to whir, pick up speed, and then erupt in a deafening chatter of gunfire, ripping through the bodies of two of those troopers, not enough to kill, but absolutely enough to maim and be lethal with no treatment, made her want to vomit, but that forced calm, that separation from the world and the present, it kept her from giving in to the nausea.

Squealer’s knee slammed into her ribs, and she jabbed her finger at the door. Taylor sucked in a breath, made sure her mask was still on her face, that her clothing seemed to be hiding about as much as it reasonably could, before reaching out and cracking the door open, skidding off the raised seat and onto the ground below in short succession. The door slammed shut behind her before she could even make an attempt to close it herself, and Squealer’s tires met concrete with the sound of burning rubber, the vehicle lurching into motion and tearing off down a street that branched off just to their left, plowing through a PRT van and sending everyone in it running.

Taylor let her power out, and for the first time felt as though she could finally _breathe_ again. Her power had an ‘off’ switch, but not an ‘on’ switch. It was always on unless she specified otherwise, and as she had learned in the incident that led to her ending up under Squealer’s care, a big enough startle could make her power explode out of her if she hadn’t used it in a while. Still, the past was the past and the present was significantly uglier; troopers bled out on the ground, others tried to pull themselves out of the wreckage of their cars, and the sound of gunfire and fighting echoed out throughout the area.

She was here just to find Mush and then go home, that was all she had to do. Still, she couldn’t help but revel a little, red spores collecting on every surface near her, giving her an awareness not unlike the one she had of her own arm. It wasn’t clairvoyance or anything, but it did make it really difficult to trip over the terrain or get hit by objects she’d covered in her power, mostly by virtue of the body instinctively avoiding tripping over itself.

That wasn’t all her power got her, though.

A group of about three troopers managed to form a line, and only one of them had a gun they could brandish, the others having a mix of batons and confoam canisters. She reached out to her power again, felt the spores mingling in the air, the ones the wind had dragged down-road, right into the troopers. Their tunics had started to stain red, their weapons, with all of those little gaps, filled in with her presence. Her power didn’t directly translate surface covering to what and where she could apply telekinesis to - she was pretty sure if she coated one side of a car entirely but not the other, she’d still be able to maneuver the car in its totality - but there was _some_ level of influence, enough that she could wrap a metaphysical fist around each of the pins in the confoam canisters and rip them free at once.

Only one of the troopers was apparently familiar enough with the sound of a confoam canister being activated to glance down. His mouth opened in a wordless cry of panic, only to be swallowed up as all five of the things exploded in unison. While with one canister alone, you could probably clog up a sidewalk, five erupting simultaneously, with all of that outward pressure being vented, was more than enough to flood the street from sidewalk to sidewalk and to build a mass of foam tall enough that she couldn’t see over it. The troopers stuck inside only had enough time to make one or two cries of confusion before they were forced to shut their mouths to avoid swallowing the foam, locking them and their voices away for the foreseeable future.

She barely paid attention to the churning, hardening mass of confoam as her power began to layer itself onto it, staining it red. Her spores - her presence - were soft on touch, a bit like dust in the corner of a room after its been given enough time to pick up stray hair and other things. It fell away pretty easily - her power had a distinct weakness when it came to being exposed to high winds - but that didn’t mean much, not right now.

Her steps carried her towards where the sound of fighting was clustered, gunfire and heavy objects slamming into one-another echoing in a chorus of metallic bangs. Her ears were ringing, though from adrenaline, mental anxiety, or the noise itself, she couldn’t really tell, but after keeping to two alleyways and following a path in the general direction Squealer went, she finally found her mark.

It was a battleground, in everything but numbers. Armsmaster was on one side of the street, barricaded by hastily-raised defenses, fold-out barriers, sandbags, the like. On the other end, Squealer sat smug in one of the turrets that slid out from her vehicle, brandishing the minigun with little care for the safety of others. It would rev up, spin into working order, and then blast out a hail of gunfire so intense it tore bricks out of buildings and carved valleys in the concrete. Behind the car was Skidmark, who was cursing wildly beneath his breath and layering field-over-field, building up an effect that looked almost solid, the air around it wavering. He had a surplus of garbage near him - dragged in by Mush, one of their main strategies when it came to firefights that involved capes - but wasn’t quite done making it. The fact that the field was shaped in a curved L-shape, letting him do all of this from behind the safety of Squealer’s monstrous vehicle, was probably not lost on Armsmaster, who was looking more and more impatient as he swerved, cut, and fought back a truly determined Mush made mostly out of hard metal scrap, a massive contrast to his normal style of loose trash with the occasional hidden scrap of razor-sharp metal hidden beneath it.

She still hadn’t yet entered the fray yet, Taylor knew. This entire scenario didn’t really make a lot of sense, it was one thing for Skidmark and company to go out to face down an enemy, that wasn’t altogether unusual. They usually needed to do so, if only because Skidmark only really became a threat when Mush was with him, and the Merchants as a whole were neither as well-trained as the E88 or as plentiful as the ABB in terms of normal humans. Most of them just sold drugs, which made them easy targets when it came to gang warfare or heroes coming in to bag them. The fact that Mush was decked out to the nines in scrap metal, ostensibly a threat, meant that something about this was pre-planned, this wasn’t a reaction to something, not like it always was before.

What gave her away, she wasn’t sure, but Squealer locked eyes with her from her elevated position, smiled, and then pointed at Armsmaster, before her face slid into a scowl and she dragged her thumb across her neck. A threat, then, she could keep her conscious less tainted under the threat of another beating or being threatened with her old minder, a guy who they called Strangle. Taylor was pretty sure he didn’t have any powers, but he’d lived up to his name on the few occasions she had backtalked him. The memory alone was enough to get her legs to move, slipping out from the crook of the alley and drawing her attention back to her power, which parts had already been stained red enough to act as weapons until she could cover Armsmaster and lock him down. She hefted a few of the chunks of brick that Squealer had broken off and hurled them at Armsmaster, who swerved to avoid one and parried the other with the flat of his halberd.

Mush retreated a few steps, lowering the top half of his body down into a crouch, metal screeching against metal and concrete.

“Fuckin’ surprised, aren’t’cha?” Skidmark gloated from behind Squealer’s vehicle, much to the lack of his own self-awareness. “Got us a new fucker, so we’ll be fuckin’ showin’ just what kind of bullshit we’ll be taken from civvie-garglers like you. Make a mark, make you a fuckin message, ruin you like a nasty fuckin’ whore.”

Then, to prove his point, Skidmark dropped a chunk of concrete the size of his torso into his field. The field took hold of it and dragged it around at speeds so fast Taylor couldn’t even follow them, firing it out with a sharp crack sound. Armsmaster had to dodge, and just barely managed it, the hunk of concrete tearing into the building behind him. When the dust cleared, there was a distinct hole and someone inside was screaming in pain, though Taylor refused to let herself look at what the source might be.

Armsmaster didn’t give away a lot, but the grit of his jaw, the tightening of fingers around the hilt of his halberd, he knew what was happening, and so did Taylor. They could beat him here, technically, sure his Halberd was a pain but she could lock him down given enough time and effort, and with Skidmark’s power if he hesitated for just a second he’d end up being hit with enough force to significantly hurt him. Mush was fully metal this time around, and he alone posed a larger threat than he probably ever had in the years since he’d taken to joining the Merchants. All of this was on top of his inability to flee, as if he tried to scale the walls of the closed-in street, Squealer would easily gun him down without Mush being there to prevent her from firing directly at him.

He was stuck. _Armsmaster,_ the leader of the Brockton Bay Protectorate, her childhood idol, was stuck, and likely about to be wailed on until Skidmark thought it was enough. All to make a message, a message she had enabled them to make, to put into practice.

Taylor wanted to puke.

“You know the rules,” Skidmark yelled—he was looking at her, his smile all yellow teeth. “You gotta fight, if you don’t...”

Taylor swallowed, stepping fully into the street. Mush was already bearing down on Armsmaster, one arm lashing out, catching his halberd with enough force to deflect it. Squealer shifted in her turret, occasionally firing bursts of bullets into places above or around Armsmaster, chunks of masonry dropping down towards him, while Skidmark hauled chunks of metal, concrete, and loose debris into his power, letting it carry it forward and around, each one firing off with sharp booms of acceleration.

The area around her had come into greater focus with her power, most windows that weren’t three or four floors up were made nearly opaque with the presence of her dust, and she could already take hold of nearby debris with a firm, unwavering telekinetic grip, which she did. Hundreds of smaller stones, bits of debris that would be hard to take the bulk of, rose up off the ground in sync, the act coming easy to her, each one like lifting an arm, moving a finger, a twitch of a body that wasn’t physical. She turned them, and then _pushed_ , firing the full volley of debris and stone at him. He managed to avoid some of it, but a big bit of stone cracked across his helmet one way and a half-dozen other smaller parts hit his torso, enough to jar him, open his defensive posture enough that Mush’s arm could swing in from the side, hitting with enough force to send Armsmaster reeling back against the wall with a harsh thud.

Then, as Mush always did, he _gloated_. He opened his arms wide in a grotesque mockery of a strong man’s boast, his chest was exposed, easy to hit. She even knew, just from how her power was painting him, that his actual body, the only part that mattered, was stuck in the dead middle like he was wearing it all like a suit. All the important bits, the bits he usually kept near his lower back - he transformed into a near-liquid mess, she had come to find out, to adhere to all of the bits of garbage; he wasn’t telekinetically controlling any of it - were dead center. Vulnerable.

Maybe Armsmaster noticed too, or maybe he was just mad. The feral look of rage on his face made her think the latter, but whether it was one or the other, Armsmaster simply stopped trying to take Mush down non-lethally and stabbed his spear forward, dead-center. Taylor could’ve prevented it, for sure, but Mush was already moving to intercept it, yet, she was faced with a choice. Hyperfocused, hyperaware, she could just, slip metaphysical fingers beneath the various bits of Mush’s body. Nobody would notice, and nobody did, even if Mush suddenly realized that he couldn’t move away from the incoming attack. She didn’t even have to exert much pressure at all, really, it only lasted a second, the only bit of force she applied was to stop him and slightly peel apart the defenses near his front; a tiny gap, one that you could hit him through. When it was done, she was quick to slip her control away from the body again, to let it slump, dead and gored, onto the ground, a hundred pieces of metal falling away from a resolidifying body now that it didn’t have the energy to keep itself transformed.

Armsmaster didn’t hesitate, even then. He launched forward, did something to his halberd, and fired off a volley of gunfire that tore through Squealer’s shoulder. The woman screamed, reeling, and before she could either make the turret retract into the main body of the car, Armsmaster was already there, activating some other feature of his weapon, the weapon letting loose a screech of alien noise as it was swung down, shearing through hardened metal like a knife through butter, dropping the entire extended turret - with Squealer included - to the ground. She started to scream vulgarities, only for her mouth to be met with the plated toe of his boot with perhaps a little too much force than was absolutely necessary, knocking both her and a significant portion of her teeth out.

There was a protracted beat of silence as Armsmaster began stomping his way around the car, jamming his halberd through the main bulk of it, Skidmark yelping and turning to run. He got about five paces before Armsmaster had made it around the vehicle entirely, halberd raised horizontally, a hook firing out from the top of it to slam into the man’s back, claws opened wide and tensing down, the sound of cracking bone and Skidmark’s screams echoing out into the otherwise empty alleyway, the rope gradually reeling in, dragging Skidmark over a ground covered in sharp debris and chunks of concrete. To his credit, Armsmaster didn’t do much else besides reach onto his utility belt, retrieve a confoam grenade, pop the pin, and drop it on top of Skidmark, stepping away just far enough that he wasn’t caught up in the resulting spray.

Then, finally, he turned to her.

“You stopped Mush,” he said, sounding almost blank. There was something beneath it, a deep undercurrent of scorned rage, of pithy anger that she’d never really heard out of anyone before. Shame, maybe, but through the lens of someone either unable to feel or so thoroughly unused to the emotion that it circled back around to anger. “You stopped him from blocking my attack, and you opened that gap.”

He kept approaching, and only stopped when he was thoroughly in her space. She could’ve wavered forward and ended up with her head against his chin, but she didn’t. She just kept staring, blank and unfeeling; it was nice to be detached like this, even if she was starting to wonder if this was withdrawal after a month of being near-perpetually high. Finally, after it became clear she wasn’t about to respond to his question, his jaw clenched. “ _Why._ ”

“I”—Should she say the whole truth, or only part?—“didn’t want to be a Merchant. But I think I’m addicted, now, I mean, I don’t really have a frame of reference for any of this, I only triggered a, uh, month or so ago, and they caught me out, you know?”

He probably didn’t. Still, her ramble seemed to have both caught him off guard and significantly lessened his immediate hostility towards her. “So it was forced,” he said flatly.

“I think so.”

He tilted his head to one side, looking ever blank. “You still directly caused somebody’s death.”

“I did.”

“You’re not upset about that right now?”

That... she didn’t know. “I don’t know, I don’t think so,” she echoed her own thoughts, “but I think it might be withdrawal.”

That seemed to give him some pause as well. “Do you know what they gave you?”

“Something in a needle,” she didn’t really know the specifics, and didn’t want to either. Giving it a name would make it more real, might make the floaty sensation in her head, the feeling of being detached, less persistent. She didn’t want to be anchored down by the reality that she just spent some time with the Merchants, a bulk of it so high that she didn’t even really know how long she’d been their captor for.

Finally, the last bit of Armsmaster’s tension deflated right out of him. “Right,” he muttered, another odd thing for him to do, seeing as Taylor had never seen him do much more than act like a professional. “We’re going to double-check that, but for now I’m going to cuff you and call this in.”

Taylor wordlessly offered her hands, and Armsmaster was quick to oblige, zip-tying her thumbs together with something that felt a touch more robust than plastic. He stepped away after he was done, checked Squealer, who was still unconscious and bleeding everywhere, before reaching one hand up to the side of his head and beginning to talk.

Figuring it was probably best to cut her power off now, rather than later, Taylor reached out to it as she lowered herself into a seating position. Her power pulsed back at her, an echo-like awareness of intent, of readiness, before she urged it to disperse, to die. It did so, red turning to white, just like coral, and then beginning to disintegrate. The white caught on the wind for a moment, giving the entire alleyway a bizarre contrast to the dense heat of what must be at least the start of summer, if not the middle of it, which did give her a rough timeline, she’d been taken sometime near the start of April, not that she really wanted to dwell on timelines here. Finally, when all of it was gone and faded, she was left alone, the world quiet for all but her own breathing, Armsmaster’s dull muttering, and Skidmark’s occasional attempt to scream through confoam.


End file.
